Facebook To Remove Adverts From Adult Pages

The social networking site takes action after some companies' campaigns are shown alongside sexual or violent content.

        

Facebook will stop advertisements appearing on pages containing sexual or violent content after a number of companies suspended their campaigns.

Marks and Spencer and BSkyB, the parent company of Sky News, were among those to pull their adverts from the social networking site because of concerns about placement.

It led Facebook to announce a tightening of its review process, preventing promotions from appearing on pages and groups which contain offensive content.

"Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook but also protect people and brands from certain types of content," a spokesman said in a blog post.

"We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands and we take their objectives seriously.

"While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognise we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial pages and groups."

In the first three months of the year, 85% of Facebook's revenue came from advertising - up 43% on the same quarter in 2012.

Advertisers paid a total of $1.25bn (£820m) to promote their products and services to the website's reported 665 million daily active users.

The company is paid around 3% more per advert than it was 12 months ago.

Facebook said its advertising review process will be manual at first but an automated system is expected to launch within weeks.

The spokesman added: "Like any digital platform, we're not going to be perfect but we will be much better.

"We'll continue to work aggressively on this issue with advertisers.

"We're confident the immediate steps we're taking will result in a significantly improved approach to preventing these instances from occurring, and we're committed to making this process work for everyone who uses Facebook."